The Dreamer’s revelation was like an electric current rushing through Lucy’s being, aligning her disparate experiences and memories into a proper configuration that flashed before her like a bolt of lightning.

  Her mind was thrust back to that moment when she had first encountered The System, back when it was just an enormous pile of mechanical refuse, back when Lucy couldn’t even imagine it being put together as a working machine. She remembered walking up to it, how curiosity had driven her to try and understand the remains before her, and how that thirst for knowledge had driven all the fear out of her mind.

  And that was mere moment before she heard the machine’s infernal engine for the first time, the same engine that now roared closer and closer to Lucy and the Dreamer with each passing second.

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” said the Dreamer, grabbing Lucy’s arm rather forcefully. “Hide.”

  “Hide?” Lucy looked at her with wide eyes before gesturing out to the large, empty expanse behind her. “Where? Where could we possibly hide?”

  “Don’t think about it for now,” said the Dreamer. “Don’t think about anything except how scared you are. Oh, and your light, it’s pretty handy so keep that on, please.”

  Lucy was still reluctant to follow this girl’s orders, but the freezing cold fear that made her teeth chatter and her bones shudder made her want to flee regardless. Just thinking about the massive saw blades, or the darker-than-darkness void that had sucked her in, was enough to make her Ideal’s light wildly flicker. The machine was like the cold unfeeling berth of death given form, and Lucy was still terrified of the notion of experiencing death and then being revived back in her own Dream with the full memory of that excruciating pain.

  But just as Lucy was about to nod to the Dreamer and turn tail, she remembered another thought of hers. Not one of fear, but of regret and self-loathing. For she had done absolutely nothing during her first encounter with the System to even attempt to fight back. Fighting wasn’t always an option, she knew this better than anyone, but all the same, she couldn’t just keep running away. If she’d been primarily aligned with Ideation, that would be a different story, but here in this metal hellscape, there was absolutely nowhere she could think of running away to. The Dreamer seemed adamant that they could hide somewhere now, but Lucy couldn’t trust the devious intentions that lay beneath her sweet smile. Her mission was to protect and rescue this Dreamer, and if she couldn’t trust that Dreamer, she would have to take matters into her own hands.

  And safeguarding against an overwhelming force was exactly the sort of thing a Knight of Understanding was meant to do.

  “What are you doing?”

  Lucy paid no attention to the Dreamer’s words of surprise as she shook herself free from her grasp and faced in the direction of the conveyor belt once more.

  Within seconds, the darkness burst open like a pool of the murkiest ink as the System emerged from it. It took several more seconds for its entire figure to leave the darkness, emphasizing its monstrously huge size. The towering stacks of circuit housing and motherboards and batteries and engines all looked more than familiar to Lucy, except this time there was more. It took Lucy a moment, but she knew her memory wasn’t failing her: the System had grown even bigger since her last encounter with it.

  A chill ran down her spine as her eyes tried and failed to scan the entire mountain of machinery barrelling towards her. Did that mean the woman-turned-machine had succeeded in bringing herself and the one she’d been carrying to the machine as sacrifices? The thought of her figure being disassembled and reconnected onto this unfeeling mass of killing potential made Lucy simultaneously horrified and filled with abject sorrow. How could any living being willingly give up their life to this thing?

  But now was not the time to mope, Lucy reminded herself as she took a bracing stance with her legs wide and stable, knees bent, her Ideal held before her with both hands, blade pointed directly in front of her. Like a freight train that had lost its brakes, the System kept on thundering toward her with earth-shaking chugs, soon to close the distance in a mere three hundred yards…two hundred yards…

  “Pfft. Fine. Go ahead, then.”

  The casual, dismissive voice from behind her made Lucy’s nerves want to fray or even snap. Why couldn’t this Dreamer understand that Lucy was trying to focus in this life or death situation that could get them killed if Lucy made even the slightest screw up? It was a lot like Diana and how her inflammatory words were deliberately chosen to rile Lucy up, and this only made Lucy grip her sword harder and grind her teeth into a grimace. She wanted to look back over her shoulder and scream at this girl to shut up or they’ll both die, but her light was already flickering and she was overcome with the sudden fear of losing sight of the System right before it swept over them.

  Thankfully, the Dreamer said nothing further as Lucy drew her sword over to her right side to prepare for a swing. She brought her left foot over in front of her right and twisted her entire body in that direction, winding herself up in such as to put her entire body into the force of her swing. It reminded her of when she was on that tiny boat with Cole, hacking away at the monstrous hands that had terrified her at first. Although Lucy was still afraid that she would miss or that her attack would have no effect, this memory made her more confident that her strike would land true, because she had already done something like this and saved a Dreamer in the process. It was a part of her chronicle as a Dream Knight, an iconic battle strike, and this reinvigorated her as the towering machine drew deathly close.

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  Lucy breathed. She was aiming for the pulley-arm that carried the saw blades—this time carrying not just three of them but five. If the System kept rushing forward with them intact, then it didn’t matter if Lucy and the Dreamer tried to dodge it from the side, as those blades took up enough space width-wise that there was no way the two girls could outrun them in time.

  Focus, Lucy breathed to herself. She should be happy that the saw blades were lower in the air this time, likely to increase their effectiveness, but at the cost of leaving the machine’s most direct offence wide open. The machine was banking on these protruding tools of death to scare its victims into submission, to make it appear as though it were already too late to run. And, in truth, Lucy was gravely afraid that those spinning razor-sharp blades would reach her throat before her blade could come anywhere near her target.

  But what was that old saying? “Courage can only be born from fear,” or something to that effect. Here, in this moment, Lucy could embody that very concept, and this gave her the strength to steady her shaking hands just enough as she began thrusting her arms up and across with heavy, lumbering might.

  “Raaaaaaaaahhh!”

  Her Ideal’s blade carved an effortless curve up and horizontally through the air at first, but then Lucy’s body shook as the blade stopped at the edge of the arm holding the saw blades—right as one of them was inches from Lucy’s face.

  No.

  No.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  The blades spun. Pretty silver spikes. Reflecting her light. Spikes that would meet her skin. And tear through. Spin through. Cleave through. All while her arms were raised uselessly. All while her Ideal was raised uselessly. In the air, hanging their uselessly, after bouncing off the System’s impenetrable surface.

  But it hadn’t bounced off.

  When Lucy tried to move her arms, she found that she couldn’t. She was able to wiggle the blade a little bit, but it refused to budge, as it had gotten wedged into the machine’s surface.

  Which meant it had cut through after all.

  Lucy’s mind was racing, her vision flashing back and forth between her Ideal’s blade that had cleanly cut through the first few inches of the pulley-arm, and the saw blade that whirred mercilessly so close to her eyes that it may as well have filled her entire field of vision. Her light flickered once, twice, and then was gone, leaving her in pure lack of sight even as she could hear the sound of her own demise thundering in her ears.

  She was afraid. She was afraid. She was afraid. But now that she couldn’t see anything, there was no telling when that hideous blade would reach her face, and this caused an explosion of energy to ripple through her, like a rocket suddenly set free, and she put everything she had into forcing her blade through the layers of metal it had gotten wedged in.

  There was a long, loud shing of metal being sliced, followed by the thud of something falling to the floor. The whirring stopped. Although Lucy still couldn’t see, she took a chance on reckless bravery and brought her head forward as if head-butting something in front of her.

  Just as she had desperately hoped, there was no longer a saw blade there to cut her head open.

  Breathing heavily with her arms still drawn to her left in the follow-through of her sword swing, she put all her focus into being able to see, and in a flash the Concentrated Illumination was activated once more. There, on the ground, lay the entire array of saw blades, no longer spinning, no longer approaching, laying on the ground as just another useless pile of junk. On top of that, there was loud grinding and groaning sound, and the machine stopped moving altogether.

  “Yes!” Lucy cried out, taking one hand off her sword and balling it into a fist that she drew back toward her side in a gesture of exaltation, of triumph. She looked back over her shoulder. “Did you see that? I can take this thing after all. We don’t need to run!”

  A look of shock, of admiration, of disbelief. Lucy expected at least one of those three from the Dreamer, but instead she wore a bemused expression, her arms crossed. “Yeah, yeah, good swing, hot stuff! But remember what I said, oh, I dunno, like sixty seconds ago? It gets stronger as soon as you feel confident against it.”

  “What?” Lucy said, her pounding heartbeat of triumph now awash with disbelief and frustration. “But it’s not like I stopped being afraid of it completely! I just made it a little less scary, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, no,” said the Dreamer in a dry tone without skipping a beat. “Why do you think none of the other Knights stood a chance against it? You’re nowhere close to the first one to face it head-on, and some of those guys were a lot stronger.”

  “No…” Lucy stared at her with her mouth agape, her light flickering intermittently. “That…that can’t…How do we even stand a chance, then?”

  The Dreamer sighed, shaking her head profusely with her hands on her hips, as if bemoaning her friend’s outfit of the day. “That’s why you need to listen to me. This whole Dream Knight and Dreamer thing is a two-way lane, right? Kinda like marriage. Wont’ get anywhere if you never listen to your partner, right?”

  “You—”

  “Before we discuss the implications of what I just said,” the Dreamer interjected, “I strongly suggest you get the hell away. Sweetie.”

  Lucy gulped as she took in the Dreamer’s smiling, devious nod toward Lucy’s back. Lucy turned around to find the pulley-arm—not only the floor, but levitating in the air. Its simple straight shape stretched, twisted, and burst apart, rearranging itself into a complex grid. Instead of sprouting a dozen saw blades, it grew into a single large, all-encompassing net that fed its threads inward so that anything caught within it would be brought into the mouth of a veritable army of sharp, blade-like teeth that rapidly opened and closed, as if chewing forever, for all eternity, devouring existence. Anyone and anything that the net caught would be obliterated in an instant.

  And so Lucy ran, from the machine that only grew to oppose her even more totally with each victory, alongside the Dreamer she couldn’t trust but had to follow.